


Apple Blossoms

by hellkitty



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-21
Updated: 2015-12-21
Packaged: 2018-05-08 02:23:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5479742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A spring day, and Immortan Joe takes his new Wife, Angharad, to his orchards.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Apple Blossoms

**Author's Note:**

  * For [glitteratiglue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/glitteratiglue/gifts).



“I brought you here,” Immortan Joe said, his voice thick with self-congratulation, “because you said you like flowers.”  

Angharad gave a vague nod, trying to breathe in as much of the air as her lungs could hold. It was still early, and the day’s heat was just beginning to leach color from the sky. She could--faintly--scent the trace of the flowers in the air. Up here, the air was almost fresh--not stone-dank like most of the Citadel, or the overbaked smell of the sand of the Wasteland.  Here, though, she could smell...green. Leaves, and bark and tree sap and the rich scent of soil beneath her bare feet.  

It felt enough like home to hurt.

“Apples,” he said, as if she didn’t already know, as if she didn’t remember, as if she hadn’t had memories of long drowsy summer afternoons and fruit-laden branches. Before the Ill Wind had come, salting the land, warping the trees and blackening the fruits on their stems.  “Everything here is useful,” he said, proudly, inviting her to admire his thrift, his planning. 

It was so like the Immortan--things must be useful to him, or else they weren’t worth preserving. Flowers must turn to fruit, and women...well…Angharad had spoken to one of the Milk Mothers, and heard of the women who had come before her, the fruit of their bellies blasted by the ill wind that was Immortan Joe's seed.  

“I have always loved apples,” she said, attempting to be bland, but the yearning was there, in her voice, like a golden thread tying her back to her past.  The island was gone, and all the Nine Queens, she told herself, schooling herself to hardness. The island was gone, that past cannot live again. All you can do is hope to join them in the afterworld. 

“I shall make sure you have as many as you want,” he said. The easy generosity of a despot, who knows he can drop his promises as easily as leaves fall in autumn. Still, the thought of the apples--firm fleshed, shiny skinned, colored like nature’s own jewels--the sweet crunch under her teeth...Angharad felt her eyes close, tipping her face to the sunlight and that small consolation. 

Joe moved, crossing into her line of sight, as though he couldn’t bear to be ignored, to not be the center of things.  Against the straight rows of the apple trees, branches frothing with blushing white blossoms, he seemed garish--sickly yellowed-white and misshapen.  Angharad managed--barely--to suppress the wince.  “It--they’re lovely,” she said, quietly, stepping closer to one of the trees, stretching one hand to trace along a branch.  The flowers seemed to shine like faces, broad and open and unafraid. 

“They last such a short time, though,” Joe said, and she felt his shadow fall against her. Why did he have to remind her of that? she thought, crossly. She knew. She knew all too well. 

“All things of beauty do,” she answered. “Perhaps that’s why we think them beautiful.” 

“My lovely philosopher.” Joe reached across the distance between them, lifting a strand of her hair over her temple.  “But if that were true, the only things that last forever are ugly.”

She could hear the laboring of his breath without his mask, and fought the urge to insist that it was true: he was ugly, unspeakably ugly, twisted and gnarled in ways far deeper than his lumpy, scabby skin.  There was an ugliness deep inside him, like the poisonous seeds of the apple: death lurking inside white flesh. 

Or maybe she was the apple, she thought, wildly, suddenly. Maybe she was the threat wrapped in sweetness, her skin the brown satin of its seeds. It heartened her, enough that she could meet his gaze evenly. “Nothing lasts forever,” she said. 

“Ah,” Joe said, and he lay the strand of hair against her shoulder, fingertips trailing down the tawny skin of her arm. An attempt at gentle, but it felt like a corpse’s clammy touch.  “You’re thinking of your island.” 

“I am.” And it felt like a defiance, to think of her home here, now. To think of something Immortan Joe hadn’t stamped his presence on. 

“That has passed,” he agreed. “Because there was no planning. No foresight. No one in charge.” His chest puffed. “I have taken care of all of that. For us. For all of us.” 

For yourself, most of all, she thought. She turned back to the trees, leaning in to smell the light fragrance of the apple blossoms--faint and promising sweetness. 

“I wish I had a camera,” Joe said, with a sigh, and then explained--showing off, as it seemed he must at all times. “It’s a device, before the world came to its end, that captured images.”

“The elders of Annwn knew of them,” Angharad said, almost defensive.  “They said that such things captured a part of the soul.” 

Joe scoffed. “Superstition.” As though he’d expected nothing better. “But I wouldn’t mind capturing a part of your soul, Angharad.”  

He gave a grin that she supposed he thought charming, but it, and the words, were predatory. She wondered, briefly, wildly, if he had ever been handsome. It was impossible to imagine. She felt like a raven had flown over her shadow. “It is not anyone’s to capture.” She drew herself up, pulling the thin white wrap over her shoulders--the sun's gilding fading to pale, as though she was becoming a daughter of the moon.  

He laughed, a bellowy sound with a wheeze at the end. “And that is why I know you are not like the others, splendid flower.” He turned, gesturing broadly at the grove of trees--apple here, and she could see trellises of vines in the background, every inch of cultivable space used here, clinging to the top of the Citadel’s three towers.  “I am starting anew, as is the world.” He nodded, to himself, as though rehearsing lines of one of his speeches. “My other wives were of the old world, the corrupt world, and they bred nothing but corruption. But you are of the newer world, born after the great conflagration.”  

Angharad wanted to point out that he was still of the old, he, still, held its corruption.  But he held his hands out, palms up, gesturing for hers.  “Together, splendid Angharad, we shall heal the world.” 

If only she was naive enough to believe that.  If only she could think of this as a partnership. But she saw the bars on the windows, and the heavy vault door, the hooded windows keeping her even from the sun and sight of the sky.  She felt something like despair, as he took her hands, impatient with waiting for her to offer hers. But she was Angharad, one of the daughters of Annwn of the Nine Queens, and queens stood tall, even as the Nine had when the first ships--rust-reeking things belching plumes of greasy smoke, like pennants of the Ill Wind itself.  She had worn the robes and sung to the trees, and lay, heart bare, beneath a full moon.  

And it hadn’t saved her from anything; it had brought her here, wrists bound in iron that burned and chafed. Here to the man who called her a vision, a beloved, a prize, even as he replaced the iron with guards and isolation.  

Like the apple, she bloomed--as she could--only at his whim, saw sunlight only at his behest.  And like the apple, her beauty only mattered if she could put forth fruit.  The thought sickened her, high in her belly.  

“Angharad,” Joe said, squeezing her hands in his, and she could feel muscle under the skin and the threat of force. “I know you are lonely, here.  I know you miss your island. But there is no island, for you, for anyone. Not like it was. Nothing like this, green and fruitful." He let go of one hand, to tilt up her chin. "And I shall get you sisters, companions. From all corners of the Wasteland. In fact.” He lifted his eyes from hers, to the coppery beige of the main road. Angharad turned, and she could see the puffs of dust rising along the road behind a dark snake of a vehicle. One of his ‘War-Rigs’, as he called them, crawling with the strange, pale War Boys, over cargo holds full of the scraps of the world.  “Right now,” the Immortan said, “they bring for us a sister for you. Or two, perhaps, if you can bear to share me.  You can help me choose.” 

Help him choose, she thought. Help consign other women to this life--if it could be called a life.  Safe from a slow death by starvation, but at what cost? 

In sisterhood there is strength, the Nine Queens had said.  These other women, they could be her sisters, perhaps. Not daughters of the moon, perhaps, but sharing a bond that was just as strong, if darker.  Angharad let her gaze shift to the apple blossoms again, five pure petals, joined at the center. So fragile looking, yet capable of surviving the worst of the spring’s tempests, and growing, boldly, defiantly beautiful, even here where the sky seemed like a shroud stretched over the already-dead.  And she thought of the apple itself, sliced sideways, the secret pentagram hidden within, a sign of strength and immortality. “Five of us, I think.” Five to bear the burden. Five to dream and hope and plan. Five voices, five minds, joined together in one sole purpose--that one day, they would, all of them, walk among the flowers, free. 


End file.
